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"What an odd thing a diary is: the things you omit are more important than those you put in."
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"And there never was an apple, in Adam's opinion, that wasn't worth the trouble you got into for eating it."
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Personal Development

"In the middle section of the book Mirabelle breaks into not one, but two houses near Belgravia Books. I had fun scoping these out - checking which windows looked least secure and figuring out how to scale the mews houses to the rear to get her inside. A man came out at one point, 'What are you doing?' he questioned me. 'The thing is, I'm writing a book,' I started with a smile. He waved me off, his hand as wide as a tennis racket. 'Everyone is writing a book, my dear,' he said. Between you and I, it's his house that MIrabelle ends up breaking into."
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Personal Development

"I write because, as wonderful as life is - and it is truly wonderful - it isn't enough. It does not, for example, contain dragons. I find this unsatisfactory. So I read. And I write."
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Personal Development

"After each of his books, the writer, for a while, feels once again that he can now die happy."
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"When you put down the good things you ought to have done and leave out the bad things you did do - well that's memoirs."
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"In writing, you must kill all your darlings."
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Personal Development

"And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you."
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Personal Development

"A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way. It's a lie if you make something up. But you make it up in the name of the truth, and then you give your heart to expressing it clearly."
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Personal Development

"You spill a lot of beans in historical fiction. Crime fiction is about spilling no beans at all. You spill the least beans you possibly can. So because I had already written historical fiction before I was really good at the spilling beans section, but the new skill I had to learn when I was writing Brighton Belle was difficult. I had to avoid the equivalent of shouting, "this character's a murderer! Look who did it!."
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Personal Development

"It just happens to be the way that I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them."
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"To catch a husband is an art; to hold him is a job."
Art


"Society, being codified by man, decrees that woman is inferior; she can do away with this inferiority only by destroying the male's superiority."
Society


"To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object."
Being


"The present is a transitory existence which is made in order to be abolished: it retrieves itself only by transcending itself toward the permanence of future being; it is only as an instrument, as a means, it is only by it's efficacy with regard to the coming of the future that the present is validly realized: reduced to itself it is nothing , one may dispose of it as he pleases."
Philosophy


"One is not born a woman, but becomes one."
Woman


"I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity."
Infinity


"It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills."
Life


"Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap."
Being


"She gives birth in pain, she heals males' wounds, she nurses the newborn and buries the dead; of man she knows all that offends his pride and humiliates his will. While inclining before him and submitting flesh to spirit, she remains on the carnal borders of the spirit; and she contests the sharpness of hard masculine architecture by softening the angles; she introduces free luxury and unforeseen grace."
Humanity


"When an individual is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he does become inferior."
Equality
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